


lying in the reeds

by crimsonpeak2015



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M, i just think they’re neat, me writing this “i hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me”
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22517914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimsonpeak2015/pseuds/crimsonpeak2015
Summary: after the cruises scandal, there’s a lot of work to do. and a lot of late nights at gerri’s doing it.
Relationships: Gerri Kellman/Roman "Romulus" Roy
Comments: 7
Kudos: 94





	lying in the reeds

**Author's Note:**

> before you doing anything, go listen to “all i need” by radiohead, then come back and read this

As with practically everything that he did, it started out selfishly. Waystar had turned into a pressure cooker after the cruises scandal, and Roman couldn’t handle it. Karl was bad and Frank was bad and Logan was  _ bad _ , and everything was moving so quickly that he was paralyzed. There was so much to do and he could barely even think. There were shareholders to call and lawyers to talk to, companies flipping shit and news networks to blackmail. What the fuck was he supposed to do? He had done exactly one thing right in his entire run at the company, who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to trust him with all of this? And now that Greg was off with Kendall (fucking Kendall, man) even insulting people did nothing for him. 

So he went to Gerri. Always Gerri. It was midnight the first time he showed up at her door, itchy and anxious under his skin, looking for the sharp chill in her blue eyes to cool and still him. He was startled when she opened the door, by just how tired she looked. He had forgotten how busy she was. He was struck by how the pieces of hair that fell from her sloppy bun were starting to curl up into wispy ringlets, how her makeup was faded and smudged, how her eyes were dim. He had never seen her so human before, and something deep inside him softened a bit. 

She was on the phone, didn’t bothered to greet him. Just a glare and a jerk of her head to invite him inside. He entered and shut the door quietly and sat on the sofa with his shoes on. There was no way he could bring up their arrangement, the one kind bone in his body wouldn’t let him. Not now. He didn’t say anything, went into the bathroom and jacked off quickly, quietly, just to get it out of the way. When he came out, she mouthed “disgusting” at him. That was the closest they came to conversation all night.

He waited and waited for her call to end, for her to stop signing shit, for her to pay attention to him. But they never did and she never did, and that whole first night he sat there in silence, every so often passing her gentle glances and warming to watch her lips curl softly at the corners. Just sitting there, he felt more useful than he had in weeks. He fell asleep there, easily and accidentally, and when he awoke Gerri was still at her desk.

\----

It was like that for a week. He would show up whenever and she would let him in and he would just sit there and watch her. There were so many things about her that he had never noticed before. So many little things, he wondered if she was even aware of them. The way she lifted her pinky when she did her signature, only her signature. The little flick of her wrist when she wrote the ‘K’. The way she capped and uncapped her pens while she was on the phone. 

He discovered on the fourth night that she only turned her lamp on once it was completely pitch black, even though it was right by her chair. On the sixth night he noticed her pulling off her socks with her feet, and it felt so silly and so fucking natural that he couldn’t help but giggle. Her eyes had flicked up immediately and her glare was so piercing that he shivered, felt himself get hard. 

He watched her tug at the loose strands of hair that fell on the back of her neck, not bothering to tuck them back into her bun, and wondered what her neck would feel like against his lips. 

At work the next day he found himself practicing her signature on whatever paper he could find, wound up with smudged ‘Gerri Kellman’s covering his forearm. He didn’t give a fuck if anyone saw them, felt almost blessed to carry her name on his skin. Like a brand. Anyway, if anyone asked he could say he had to sign something for her. Pretty standard forgery shit. 

\----

By the second week, Gerri had started leaving her door unlocked. Just for him. He wanted to cry or to thank her or  _ something _ , but he knew that to acknowledge it destroy the quietness of the gesture. Instead, on the eighth day, he approached her desk and began to flick silently through the papers, looking for something he understood, something he could do. 

“Rome?”

It sounded almost foreign, he hadn’t heard his name on her tongue like that in what felt like eons. It was gentle when she said it, tired and preoccupied but patient, and he decided he never wanted anyone to say his name ever again. He would make everyone call him Philip or some shit from now on. If only to ensure that Gerri was the only person in the world who could call him Roman. When she said it, it felt like it had gravity and weight, like it was heavy in her mouth. Like it meant something.

“Yeah?”

“Can you read these over and sign them for me?” She nodded to a mass of documents.

“Yeah. Of course.” 

He grabbed the stack and a pen and plopped himself down by her feet, back against the drawers of her desk. He always liked to be below her. He felt small there, small and secure. And he liked to be able to look up and watch her above him, covering him, the only thing he could see.

After that, for the next several nights, he would let himself in and find a stack of papers at the corner of her desk, marked with an ‘R’ scrawled on a yellow post-it. She never brought up his habit of pocketing the notes, though he knew that she saw him do it. 

On the eleventh night, he accidentally caught her eye as he peeled off the post-it, and she made sure to keep his gaze as he folded it and slid it into his pocket. It had made him uncomfortably warm, the odd vulnerability of that, the shame of it. That she knew he kept them. That she was probably laughing at him for it, the childishness of it. He remembered her blue eyes glancing down to the bulge that was forming in his pants, growing dark with an amusement that only made him worse.

He appreciated her ways of playing with him, in those subtle, silent moments that assured him that she wasn’t just using him (though he really wouldn’t mind if she was), that this was more than work help. That this meant something to her and that she hadn’t forgotten about him. 

\----

By the end of the second week things had begun to slow down. For her at least. She was so fast and efficient, and he was endlessly astounded, endlessly in awe of her. He would sit and stare up at her until she glanced at him, and then suddenly find interest in the lines of the wood under him. 

On one particularly frustrating night, she was on the phone with someone who clearly had no idea what was going on. An intern, she told him later. The conversation had been going on for an unprecedented amount of time, round and round in circles, and Gerri was getting really aggravated. Roman could hear it in her voice, the way it changed, became demanding and patronizing. The way she put force behind every word. It was a tone with which he was intimately familiar, a tone that triggered something primal and pulsing in him, a tone that the fucked up animal part of his brain was trained to respond to. And she had trained him very well.

He hadn’t known that she spoke to other people like that. He had thought it was a voice for him alone. He fucking felt like a cuck, sitting there with his ass falling asleep as Gerri called  _ someone else _ “an incompentant shit” in her most terrifying voice. And he didn’t like how hot he found it all.

He flicked her calf petulantly until she kicked him hard in the thigh and hissed “this isn’t fucking about you, jealous fuck.”

He came before the call ended.

\----

Halfway through the third week, she suggested he bring his own work in, because he had, in all honesty, gotten jack shit done and she was practically finished. So he did. 

On the seventeenth night he made Gerri answer the door for the first time in days, because his arms were full of papers and various devices and a family-sized bag of assorted mini candy bars. Gerri never had anything to eat. And if he was gonna be working, he was gonna be eating. 

“Candy?” She practically sneered at him and he tossed her the bag. “How old are you again?”

“I’ll be seven on tuesday! Why?” 

She shook her head with a chuckle and he realized, with a sudden awful ache in his stomach, that once this whole cruises deal blew over and everything was back to normal, this thing (this coming to her house every night, this shared little infinity where the world stopped spinning) would be over. He wondered if she dreaded the end like he did. They had become so comfortable, so easy together.

They sat on the sofa and Gerri helped him separate all of the documents into piles, make a list of the phone calls he had. He stared at her shuffling papers, tried to catch every miniscule movement of her body, tried to save it in his memory so he would never forget the way her blouse creased over the folds of her stomach, the way that, when she swept her hair up into a bun, some of the strands got caught in her earring. And the way she absentmindedly unhooked the hair with her index finger. A practiced motion. 

Somewhere in between the time they sat down and the time he fell asleep, he had slid off the couch and onto the floor, and somewhere after that they opened the chocolate and he made her try one. Her eyes lit up and she laughed, like really laughed. 

“I haven’t eaten these in probably 30 years. Wow.”

“I told you. See? If you stopped being such a stuck up bitch you might have some more fun.”

Roman was leaning his head gently against her knee, when she reached her hand down and eased her fingers into his mouth. To clean them off, he realized. Like a fucking dog. Fuck. He tilted his head back to rest on the cushion and to gaze up at her. She wasn’t even looking at him, instead scrolling cooly on her phone, absolutely unreadable. But her fingers were pushing deeper and he sucked eagerly, trying to swallow her. He wanted all of her inside of him, to keep her there forever. He moaned. 

And then Gerri’s phone rang, and she practically yanked her fingers out of his mouth. He whimpered and he leaned over to see who was calling, to cancel the call. She swatted him away but he managed to see the caller ID. It was his dad. Of fucking course it was. Who else would it be, interrupting this? Logan just had to wreck every moment of happiness he got. He wiped the wetness from his cheek and tried his best to think about anything fucking else besides the fact that his dad was on the phone and Gerri’s hand had just been in his mouth. How empty he felt now. 

“What’s up?” Gerri’s voice was detached and formal, and he noticed that she sat up a little straighter. She was like a fucking milf David Copperfield, magical in the way that she changed. It was his only explanation as to how she could transform so quickly, so naturally, into a brand new person.

He recalled that Greek myth about Zeus showing a mortal woman his true form, and how she exploded into nothing when she saw him. It was romantic, it a dark kind of way, someone so powerful being so vulnerable that it kills their love. Roman wondered if he’d ever see her true form, and if it would kill him too. He hoped so.

His attention was drawn back to the conversation when he heard his name.

“Roman? No I don’t know where he is.” 

She paused, locked eyes with him, and frowned.

“Yeah, yeah. I know, he’s an idiot. Okay, bye.” 

He watched her hang up, pasting a goofy grin on his face to hide the way warmth bubbled in his chest and spread up his neck to his cheeks. He had never wanted to keep any of his relationships private, not before this. They had all been performances, simply ways to quell his family and the press. And to feed that dark part of himself that hungered for the shame of knowing that he could never be what anyone wanted of him. 

But this, this special whatever, he wanted just for them. And so did Gerri. 

She watched him look at her for a minute, then cleared her throat and he looked away. 

“Get your head out of your dick for ten minutes and get back to work.”

“Ten minutes? Seems pretty unreasonable to me, if I’m being honest.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Just try, come on.”

And he did. Fuck, he tried so hard. It really was incredible, what Gerri could produce from him. Every time she pushed him, he got more done than he ever thought possible. It was all her doing, it really was, and he could never properly express how grateful he was, at every hour of the day, that she had put her faith in him and let him grow into what she knew he could be. Her mold of what she wanted from him. And if he couldn’t be exactly what she wanted, he didn’t want to be anything at all. 

  
  


They finished more that night that he had in the whole two and a half weeks before. He fell asleep at 3:00, on the floor, right by her feet. Like a fucking dog.

\---- 

On the twentieth night, he had no extra work left to do but he went over anyway. Mostly because he didn’t even think to go back to his own apartment, it didn’t occur to him that this should be done now. He was nervous, though, as he entered, that she would kick him out. Technically whatever this was was over.

But she didn’t even look up when he came in. It was dim in the living room, only lit by the glow of the tv. Her legs were up on the coffee table, nylons shining blue in the light and he could, if he squinted, sort of make out the outline of a bra underneath her white blouse. She was radiant in her ordinariness, her naturalness. He felt he didn’t deserve the privilege to see her like that. 

He moved to sit down on the ground next to her, to lean against her thigh, and she ran a hand through his hair absentmindedly. They just sat and watched the news like that, though he was paying far more attention to the way that Gerri twisted his hair through her fingers and tugged gently every so often. It was the sort of unfocused, halfhearted movement that reminded him of her clicking pens. He turned to nuzzle her leg with his nose, rubbing his cheek and forehead against her softness. He wanted to purr.

\----

On the twenty fifth day, Gerri had a meeting after work. He hadn’t realized, or forgot, or something, and had shown up at her door to find it locked. After weeks and weeks of opening it and walking in like he lived there too, like they shared that space and that couch and that desk. He had thought, maybe, that Gerri hadn’t minded the way that he settled in there. How he left a toothbrush in the bathroom now, how he left snacks in the pantry and left-overs in the fridge. He had, in an unconscious way, thought she wanted him there. His heart sank and his stomach twisted. He wanted to vomit, he couldn’t help but laugh. Laugh at himself for hoping that this was more than a little workplace game, laugh at how he should have expected this. And how silly he was for even wanting any of this. It was Gerri, for god’s sake. She wasn’t domestic. But neither was he. Maybe that was why he had thought it was working. 

Fuck it, whatever. It didn’t matter anyway, not really. He had gotten all of his fucking work done, and she had too, and he got off a few times in the process. That’s what all this had been about, right? 

Roman found himself at a bar that Kendall had taken him to once, to be trip sitter. This place had wild designer shit and he really just needed to go off the rails tonight. He had never really been into the whole party scene, much to his own chagrin and everyone else’s surprise. Just another way to be a complete embarrassment, he couldn’t even be a cool partier. He had to settle instead for “guy who goes to parties and pretends to go crazy.” Or designated driver. Clubs and drugs and shit just kinda made him feel stupid and out of control, two things he only liked to feel in the privacy of Gerri’s bathroom. 

But tonight was different. 

Tonight was different, until it wasn’t. Until it was 10:00 and he got a text from Gerri.

  * **Where are you?**



Why the fuck did she care where he was. She clearly hadn’t cared earlier. He ignored her.

Ten minutes later, he got a call. He dodged out of the building to pick up, because fuck it. Because he couldn’t remember the last time  _ she  _ called  _ him _ . And because, despite everything, he really just wanted to hear her voice. 

“Hey Ger-bear, how’s it kicking?”

Sarcastic. He couldn’t let her know he was hurt. 

Except that her voice, though stoic, was tinged with sadness, and she sounded so fucking  _ real  _ in that moment that he knew couldn’t ever hate her. Even if she killed his whole family and chopped his dick off and then disappeared, he wouldn’t hate her. Even if he wanted to. 

“Are you coming over?”

“What?!”

“What do you mean ‘what’?”

“I came over and your door was locked. So I figured you were over this little arrangement. That’s what I mean.”

“What time was this?”

“Ehhh, around 6:00.”

To his shock, Gerri started to laugh. He felt himself heat with anger and frustration and something else, because she was so goddamn hot when she was being cruel.

“Roman, I was at a meeting. I wasn’t even at home. I told you that last night.”

Fuck.

“Well, ya know, you probably wouldn’t be fully alert either, if someone shoved a vibrator up your ass and didn’t let you come for 2 hours.”

“God do you ever think with your brain?”

He couldn’t hold back a grin, couldn’t ignore the bubbly golden warmth that spread through his whole body. And he couldn’t stop himself from hauling ass all the way to her house either.

\----

It was the morning after, the morning of the twenty sixth day. The pale blue morning that reminded him of Gerri’s pale blue eyes. 

He got into work and found on his desk, a yellow post-it note, with a familiar ‘R’ on it. 

And beside it, engraved with ‘G.K’, a small brass key. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
